Capstone talk: "An Elegant Radical: Luisa Moreno and Her Search for Social Justice"

"An Elegant Radical: Luisa Moreno and Her Search for Social Justice"

An immigrant from Guatemala, Luisa Moreno was one of the most prominent women labor leaders in the United States. From 1930 to 1947, she mobilized seamstresses in New York’s Spanish Harlem, cigar rollers in Florida, and cannery women in California. The first Latina to hold a national union office, she served as vice-president of the CIO cannery union (UCAPAWA). She was also the driving force behind the 1939 El Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Española, first national U.S. Latino civil rights conference. Moreover, before journeying to the United States, she was a 1920s feminist intellectual wgi published poetry and participated in the cultural renaissance led by Diego Rivera in Mexico City. Relying on oral interviews with Moreno, her daughter, and many friends and associates as well as on Moreno’s own writings, this presentation traces how Moreno embodied a quintessential transnational subject given her movement across discordant spaces, physical and intellectual, spaces where she found renewal and purpose.

Funded by the Mellon Arts & Urban Experience Grant, Howard & Roberta Ahmanson

Vicki L. Ruiz is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. A first generation college-bound student, she received her PhD in History from Stanford University in 1982. An award-winning scholar and educator, she is the author of Cannery Women, Cannery Lives and From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth- Century America and co-author of Created Equal: A History of the United States. She and Virginia Sánchez Korrol co-edited the three-volume Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, which received a 2007 “Best in Reference” Award from the New York Public Library. Over the course of her career, Ruiz has participated in numerous public history and community engagement programs, including Arizona State’s Hispanic-Mother Daughter Program. From 2007-2012, she served as Dean of the School of Humanities at UC Irvine. In 2012 Professor Ruiz was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Directing twenty-six dissertations, she has mentored four generations of graduate students from UC Davis, Claremont Graduate School, Arizona State, and UC Irvine. The National Women’s History Project named her a 2015 Honoree in recognition of her scholarship. Ruiz has also received a lifetime achievement award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Association. She is past president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. On September 10, 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Vicki L. Ruiz the National Humanities Medal, the eighth UC faculty member and first Latina so honored.